C. Thi Nguyen Explains Our Gamified World in His New Book, ‘The Score’

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen remembers when misery turned out to be his salvation. He had just graduated from college and was living in a Boston suburb, working as a tech writer. “I made a lot of money,” he recalled on a recent afternoon in his Salt Lake City home. But the cash came at the cost of spending too much time doing something he hated. “That was the death of the soul.”

So Nguyen enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at U.C.L.A., picking up the subject he had majored in at Harvard. Completing his Ph.D. took him 11 years, though in his defense, he was also working as a food writer for The Los Angeles Times. His double life as a philosophy grad student and professional food journalist was just one unconventional twist in a trajectory that’s been full of them. In addition to cultivating a life of both the mind and the senses, he also loves games: board games, video games, role-playing games, games of skill and games of chance — not to mention fly-fishing, rock climbing and, lately, yo-yoing.

You might not think of these last three activities as games, but like the others, they present a participant with a goal to be pursued under certain constraints. For Nguyen, the point — and pleasure — of games is play, not efficiency; a person who simply wants to catch more fish would trade Nguyen’s feathery hand-tied flies for a big net or a blast of dynamite.

For a long time, Nguyen was told to keep his personal passions separate from his scholarship. “No one in the world, in philosophy or out, was interested in the philosophy of games,” he said. “Like I was forbidden from working on it in grad school.” (He wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of moral testimony.) But now, in another unlikely turn in Nguyen’s unorthodox career, his private pastimes and his principal vocation have converged.

This week, Penguin Press is publishing “The Score,” his mind-expanding exploration of the philosophy of games, showing how scoring systems teach us what to desire and make our motivations legible to one another. The book arrives at a time when everyday life has been gamified. Tech platforms keep us “engaged” with applause and leader boards and sprays of digital confetti. Apps ply us with rewards and metrics for optimizing our diet, our exercise, our sleep. As a games enthusiast, Nguyen noticed a discrepancy that seemed to be getting ever more extreme: In some domains, trying to increase your score can be fun and satisfying, while in others — like getting rich as a tech writer — it can utterly crush your spirit.

Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: “Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?” His hope, as he puts it in the subtitle, is to teach readers “How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.”